Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:…duplici modo Daemon homini carnaliter copulatur:Ludovico Maria Sinistrari's Alternative to Apostasy and Sorcery in Human-Incubus IntercourseBert RoestLodovico Maria Sinistrari d'Ameno (1632-1701), who joined the Riformati branch in 1647 in the Pavian Provincia di S. Diego, is one of the many productive seventeenth-century Franciscan authors whose works are not habitually discussed within the world of Franciscan scholarship. According to the existing bibliographical guides, Sinistrari authored under his own name and under various pseudonyms (such as Panfilo, Clodoveo Farvamondi, Nicolò Turris, Lazaro Socio, and Lazaro Agostino Cotta) about 34 works, more or less half of which reached the printing press during his lifetime. These works cover a wide range of genres and topics, including comedies, religious and secular dramas, astrological, astronomical and scientific works (including polemics against works of other scholars, medical and embryological papers), defenses of the religious orders, sermons and funerary orations, treatises of sacramental theology, some atypical hagiographical texts, and works of religious disciplinary law. This production was linked to his acknowledged expertise in a variety of disciplines, which apparently made him a celebrated lecturer in Pavia within the order and in public schools, teaching the liberal arts, geometry, military architecture and theology. Some of his works are connected with his activities as a preacher, advisor, and later censor for the Holy Office, practicing exorcist, consultant for the Franciscan Minister General, and personal theologian of Alessandro Montecatini (Archbishop of Avignon) and Federico Caccia (Cardinal and Archbishop of Milan).1Within the order itself, his most enduring legacy might have been his three volume Practica criminalis illustrata, a work that is both a commentary on penal law within the Franciscan order, and a more wide-ranging manual for dealing with penitential and religious-criminal issues, written [End Page 191] to supplant older handbooks of such kind. He was initially tasked to compile such materials at the Franciscan general chapter celebrated at Rome in 1688. The first two volumes of the Practica criminalis illustrata appeared in print in 1693. They were again published posthumously in 1702.2 In between he finished another volume of the Practica with a somewhat different focus, also known under the title De delictis et poenis tractatus absolutissimus, and which was proposed as a useful guidebook for judges, lawyers, and prelates in ecclesiastical courts, as well as for confessors, exorcists, and lay practitioners of law. This work was issued for the first time in 1700.3Although a wished-for early eighteenth-century re-issue of this multi-volume Practica criminalis illustrata was put on hold when it was placed on the index of forbidden books in March 1709 donec corrigatur for suspicion of laxist tendencies,4 all three volumes did appear again with some modifications in a 1753-1754 opera omnia edition. It could be found in a significant number of Franciscan and non-Franciscan order libraries, and apparently remained for a long time an important resource for penitential and disciplinary policies.5 [End Page 192]Whereas Sinistrari, like so many early modern friars, is not a commanding presence in the scholarly and literary canon of present-day Franciscan order history, he became a figure of some fascination and even notoriety in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century esoteric circles, and also is known by modern scholars of early modern demonology and early modern sexuality. This is mainly due to the publication, in the later nineteenth century, of two of Sinistrari's works on demoniality and sodomy that as such were not printed in full during our friar's lifetime, but parts of which are included in Titulus 4 of his Latin De delictis et poenis tractatus absolutissimus, namely the crimes against chastity (which in De delictis et poenis, alongside of daemonialitas [which comes last], comprises constortium suspectum, sollecitatio ad turpia, fornicatio, stuprum, incestus, raptus, clausurae violatio, sacrilegium cum moniali, mollities, sodomia, and bestialitas).Hence, in 1875, the French book collector and editor Isidore Liseux issued for the first time De la démonialité et des animaux incubes et succubes où l'on prouve qu'il existe sur terre des créatures raisonnables autres que l'homme, ayant comme lui un corps et une âme, naissant et mourant comme...